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British boffin named first ever 'doctor of texting'

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A student at a British university has been awarded the first ever PhD in text messaging.

Linguist Caroline Tagg - now Dr Caroline Tagg - spent more than three years at Birmingham University researching the subject of text messages and the language used within them.

She trawled through 11,000 text messages sent by 235 people aged between 18 and 65 and together containing 190,000 words, and analysed them for the quality (or not) of their spelling, grammar and abbreviation.

She concluded that the average text contains 17.5 words and, contrary to the popular view that text messaging is eroding existing styles of written communication, that texts are good for the English language.

“Quite the contrary from destroying the English [language], [text messaging] is actually encouraging it,” she told newspaper The Telegraph. ®